Wolfram Alpha Shows the World Some Facebook Love
September 11, 2012
An exciting reveal from Wolfram Alpha is the release of the capability for anyone to do personal analytics with their Facebook data. Stephen Wolfram, creator of Wolfram Alpha, posted “Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook” on his blog recently, and tells us about the multiple possibilities of this data. The first round of capabilities lets users search and analyze their own Facebook history as well as their network of friends.
Wolfram asserts in the blog post:
“And today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data. Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains; now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics. And this is just the beginning; over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities.”
This free service generates a report that analyzes everything from a user’s check-ins and photos to responses to posts. Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook also allows you to share the data you gather on, you guessed it, Facebook. This extensive and impressive showing of love to Facebook is apparently just the beginning from Wolfram Alpha, which plans to add more features and capabilities as feedback begins to roll in.
Andrea Hayden, September 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
KiteDesk Aggregates Cloud Services with Actionable Data
September 8, 2012
KiteDesk, a company focused on integrating multiple cloud services in one location, got a major redesign this week for the company’s official launch. According to the article released about the service on Tech Crunch, titled “KiteDesk Goes Where Greplin Failed: Aggregates Cloud Services for Search, Discovery & Interoperability,” the platform lets users connect email, contacts, calendar events, documents from social networking, and more in your KiteDesk account. From there, you can search all of these services at once and organize the data. KiteDesk is not the first company to try to aggregate the cloud, but most other startups have not fared well.
The article gives this insight:
“[…]KiteDesk co-founder and CEO Jack Kennedy says that he thinks companies that have attempted to compete in this space have been too narrowly focused to achieve the goals that are emerging for this class of software. ‘We see Personalized Information as a “Macro Trend” that’s buttressed by other trends like BYOD, consumerization of I.T., and a gradually diminishing line between personal and professional systems,’ he explains.”
KiteDesk may succeed where others have failed by focusing more on letting users move files between services and creating streams to customize data instead of simply searching and sharing. The company is currently taking sign-ups for the free service and we look forward to seeing more from this niche.
Andrea Hayden, September 08, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Machine Learning Process Explained
September 5, 2012
Building commercial databases no longer requires so many humans, we learn from a recent post at Factual’s blog. “A Brief Tour of Factual’s Machine Learning Pipeline” does a good job explaining the machine learning workflow. The description is specific to Factual, of course, but is also a good source for understanding the process more generally.
First, algorithms begin by cleaning up and standardizing the wealth of available data. Next comes the process of resolving whether the data can help identify matches, non-matches, both, or neither. The corner cases left by this process are then analyzed, and all the results are ranked for trustworthiness and controlled for quality. That last step is where the humans finally come in. Timothy Chklovski writes:
“One important principle of our systems is that we don’t assume everything can be automated. We take random samples of our data and run them by our quality control team and through teams organized with the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. This allows us to identify specific cases that slipped through our algorithms. The errors then go back to our algorithm designers who try to find improvements.”
The write up points out that Factual strongly embraces open source solutions. Not surprisingly, they use Hadoop and HBase; they also incorporate data management tool CasaLog, dynamic programming language Clojure , and the URI-based repository dCache. Founded in 2007, the open data platform company is headquartered in Los Angeles.
Cynthia Murrell, September 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Financial Services Staff Addition at Attivio Predicts Growth
September 4, 2012
An exciting staff addition at Attivio has been announced which, according to the company, will better help its banking, insurance, credit, and investment customers address financial data problems.
Attivio, a leading unified information access software provider, has named Julio Gomez, founder of Gomez Inc., the new General Manager of Financial Services. A recent article from the The Business Journals, “Attivio Appoints Julio Gomez as GM of Financial Services,” tells us more about the company’s addition. In his new role, Gomez will work with global financial institutions to extend the company’s customer base and develop the company’s technology and financial solutions.
In the article, Gomez comments on his new role:
“Having experienced the challenges of capturing, managing and deriving insight and value from the varied forms of enterprise data, I could not be more excited to play a key role in expanding Attivio’s presence in the market. Financial institutions crave elegant solutions to prickly data problems that come up in every major initiative, from cloud computing, to big data to customer experience management. Attivio offers the level of sophistication and flexibility necessary for the highly complex, demanding and large-scale data environments in this industry.”
The article also reveals that Gomez was ranked in Time Magazine’s “Fifty Most Important People Shaping Technology” and Institutional Investor’s “Fifty Most Influential People on Wall Street.” We predict the experience Gomez brings will contribute to the continued growth of Attivio, improving customer satisfaction and investment performance.
Andrea Hayden, September 04, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories August 24 to August 30
September 3, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog provided readers with some interesting stories regarding the state of technology and the big data trends.
“Automation Hot Trend in Business Intelligence” discusses the growing industry of business intelligence to help organizations manage their data. Automation has been an important part of many BI solutions that are currently on the market:
“One company that’s scouring the social web specifically for business-specific data is FirstRain, a startup with Penny Herscher at the helm. Her company extracts the hard-to-find nuggets of relevant Twitter data for sales and marketing professionals. The big perk with FirstRain is the automation–the heavy lifting. It adds context to the data it’s found and packages it up for business use so a sales professional can immediately understand their customers. Working with the broad range of companies seeking big data and analytics solutions, FirstRain has clients in the pharmaceutical industry, finance, insurance and beyond.”
Another post, “VMware Acquires New Data Solutions Technology” highlights the recent acquisition of a small tech start-up as a way to continue innovating and growing.
The CEO of Pattern Insight wrote in a recent blog post:
“Ever since we started Pattern Insight, our vision has been to change how people search, mine and analyze their vast amounts of IT and Engineering data. Log Insight, a log analytics product, is the culmination of our efforts aiming at management and real time operational analytics for IT data regardless of scale. Today, I am very pleased to announce that Log Insight, together with its technology and team, have been acquired by VMware. We are very excited for the opportunity to accelerate our vision and maximize the impact of our technology.”
“Data Analytics Is the New Tech Bubble” discusses some potential issues with those involved with big data analytics. The writer fears, that like the bursting of the tech bubble, Big Data can expect a similar reaction.
According to the article:
“We’re in the middle of a Big Data and Hadoop hype cycle, and it’s time for the Big Data bubble to burst….Yes, moving through a hype cycle enables a technology to cross the chasm from the early adopters to a broader audience. And, at the very least, it indicates a technology’s advancement beyond academic conversations and pilot projects. But the broader audience adopting the technology may just be following the herd, and missing some important cautionary points along the way.”
Sometimes it is important to cut out the middleman and invest in small companies that have more flexibility for innovation. Digital Reasoning understand the importance of automation and innovation and their flagship product Synthesys reflects that.
Jasmine Ashton, September 3, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Big Data Not Necessarily a Wise Investment
September 3, 2012
Ed Hallen at Klaviyo‘s blog douses the big data craze with a splash of reality in “The Curse of Analytics and the Big Data Hype.” Does this presage gloom for the big data cheerleaders?
Hallen notes the wealth of advertisements and articles that have lately lauded the big data analysis trend. He encourages businesses to take a step back and question whether the technology will really serve their needs. For companies in the fields of Software as a Service or Ecommerce, the answer is probably “yes.” Otherwise, this trend may not be a wise investment. He writes:
“Here’s the problem – analytics are expensive. They take time, they take knowledge, they take investment in analysis tools and data systems, and crucially, they require we be willing to change our behavior based on what we learn.
“Moreover, analytics without purpose and no tie to decisions keep us from focusing on the most important tasks ahead of us. It’s a lot like eating a Snickers bar for lunch – it’s tasty, but it doesn’t stick with us for very long and doesn’t leave us much better off.”
Very good points. The write up suggests a few questions to ask when considering an investment in big data analysis tools. Check them out, then file them away for the day the issue comes up at your organization (if it hasn’t already).
Cynthia Murrell, September 03, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Free Data Mining Book
September 1, 2012
We love free stuff! We’ve found a free data mining book from Cambridge University Press titled “Mining of Massive Datasets.” Act fast, though; the link could go bad at any time. The description tells us:
“The publisher is offering a 20% discount to anyone who buys the hardcopy Here. By agreement with the publisher, you can still download it free from this page. Cambridge Press does, however, retain copyright on the work, and we expect that you will obtain their permission and acknowledge our authorship if you republish parts or all of it. We are sorry to have to mention this point, but we have evidence that other items we have published on the Web have been appropriated and republished under other names. It is easy to detect such misuse, by the way, as you will learn in Chapter 3.”
A subtle plug, there. Version 1.0 is available for download, as is a draft of the in-progress version 1.1. Chapter titles include such topics as “Large-Scale File Systems and Map-Reduce”, “Mining Data Streams”, and “Mining Social-Network Graphs.” (See the description for a complete list.) Authors Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman also throw in related course materials, with the plea that authorship be preserved, of course.
We recommend you download this gem while you can.
Cynthia Murrell, September 01, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
MetaVis Leaders in SharePoint Migration Web Site Launch
August 30, 2012
MetaVis Technologies are innovation leaders in the semantics industry. They are well known for their SharePoint Migration and data managing tools. Their company just recently announced the launch of their new web site, http://www.metavistech.com. The site is said to offer new solutions for migration, administration, and have different tools for SharePoint users. The article, MetaVis Technologies Launches New Website goes into more detail:
“Our new Website reflects the tremendous growth we have seen with sales growing more than 175 percent year over year,” said Peter Senescu, President and Co-founder of MetaVis Technologies. “Our new product suites are built on the MetaVis platform providing one user interface to manage all your migration, security, backup and information architecture needs in SharePoint or Office365. Customers no longer need multiple third-party vendors or products.”
MetaVis Technologies is a household name in the SharePoint migration world and nothing but the newest technologies and highest grade is expected from their latest installment. You can expect to see things like their Migration Suite, Administration Suite, Tools for Office 365, and Tools for SharePoint Users on the new site. As an added bonus all products from this company already come SharePoint 2013 ready.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Poderopedias Technology Tracks Chilean Elite
August 30, 2012
A new technology tested in the Poderopedia project completely changes the meaning of “Big Brother is Watching.” The tools are first being run in Chile to promote transparency. Data storage and queries are being used to map out and visualize the different relationships between Chile’s most influential people. The article, The Semantics Behind Poderopedia tells us a little more:
“These technologies allow us to represent a diverse set of relations between entities (people, companies, organizations) in a flexible way. The goal is to identify and express relations of power and influence of people and organizations…we added many new classes and subclasses of connections. This may sound trivial, but it involved a lot of debate and the hard work of our entire team before we could show it to others — with the hope that it could be a small contribution to the open-source community.”
This is a very interesting way to implement the use of these semantic technologies – and if the logistics of Poderopedia are of interest there is a link on the article to more details, which is a recommended quick read. Of course, it is safe to assume that if it works in Chile it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to other countries, including the US. But, here in the states it appears that invasion of privacy could come to the forefront in the execution of this kind of technology.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Business Intelligence Terms in a InetSoft Technology Environment
August 29, 2012
Sometimes things can get confusing in the tech world, specifically speaking the InetSoft Technology world. This perplexity is even worse if you do not get a few key terms. In the article, Business Intelligence Terms in the Context InetSoft’s Technology readers learn meanings to some basic InetSoft words in a practical way. This article explores buzzwords and their definitions. The three major words explored are Big Data, Data Warehouses, and Data Mining. The article then investigates their relevancy in an InetSoft context:
“This post is not just for anyone just starting to learn about the business intelligence solution space…Big Data…All kinds of transactional databases are candidates for creating Big Data, some in a matter of weeks of recording….Data Warehouses…user expectations, both from internal enterprises users as well as external customer users, have been raised where real-time or near real-time access to information is expected….Data mining…It’s the act of looking for trends, relationships, and outliers in data.”
This writer shares some interesting opinions about the relevancy of this vocabulary. This article shares the view that Data Warehouses no longer make sense. It’s certainly true that InetSoft is a unique solution with its data access that offers users two modes of real-time and near real-time catching, but that does not necessarily make Data Warehousing obsolete, at least not yet. However, IntelSoft’s specialty in visual analytics cannot be denied its supremacy.
Edie Marie, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
